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Afforestation, Propaganda, and Agency: The case of Hangzhou in Mao's China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2021

QILIANG HE Open the ORCID record for QILIANG HE [Opens in a new window]
QILIANG HE*
Affiliation:
College of Liberal Arts, Shanghai University Email: qilianghe@shu.edu.cn
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Abstract

This article examines the afforestation movement in the West Lake area in Mao's China (1949–1976). I argue that this campaign was, by its nature, propagandistic, for it created a narrative of a deforested China before 1949 and a greener land after 1949 to serve the purpose of justifying China's new political system and popularizing socialist ideologies. Hence, such projects helped to define what socialism was in China and thereby solicited the participation of the general population. This afforestation project, engineered to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rule in China both domestically and internationally, was, however, marred by both human and non-human actors. Local inhabitants who were intent upon protecting their own private properties vis-à-vis the collectivizing state, poachers who illegally felled trees for firewood and timber, and tea growers who were keen on expanding their tea plantations at the cost of mountain forests sabotaged the CCP's afforestation efforts. Meanwhile, various pests contributed to the massive death of newly planted trees and prompted local cadres and citizens to adjust afforestation policies throughout Mao's times. I argue that human and non-human actors possessed non-purposive agency—that is, agency not driven by their intentions and purposes but defined by their actions—to affect, deflect, and undercut the CCP's political agendas.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 378 - 406
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

This article focuses on the afforestation movement in the West Lake (Xihu 西湖) area of Hangzhou during Mao's times (1949–1976) (see Figures 1 and 2). Its main arguments are, first of all, that the massive tree-planting campaign served, in no small part, a propaganda purpose to legitimate the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Second, propaganda did not necessarily denote empty promises or outright deception. Instead, it did generate visible results—greener hills surrounding West Lake in this case—that brought about real economic and ecological benefits. Third, this campaign failed to achieve all its pre-set goals as it created human (mainly local villagers) and non-human (trees and pests) foes that contributed to the derailing or even the alteration of the afforesting agendas.

Figure 1. Hangzhou in China.

Source: The author.

Figure 2. Mountains and villages in the West Lake area.

Source: The author.

The decades-long afforestation campaign in the West Lake area has been propagated as a success story: in the three decades following the CCP's takeover of Hangzhou, more than 30 million trees were planted and nurtured, and approximately 4,000 hectares of bare hills are thereby blanketed with green vegetation.Footnote 1 While scholars note that afforestation is key to the government's centralized state-making initiatives in different historical contexts,Footnote 2 the state-initiated afforestation movement carried political ramifications more explicitly in Mao-era China. In Hangzhou's case, the authorities pursued two agendas. Politically, the regime publicized a narrative of deforestation in pre-1949 Hangzhou: the substantial loss of trees had stripped the mountains bare, causing severe soil erosion. The marked contrast between a greener West Lake area in post-1949 China and the barren mountains before the Liberation enabled the government to trumpet socialism's indisputable superiority and to solicit the general public's participation. In this sense, the afforestation movement functioned as propaganda, a constitutive part of a state system that underwrote the legitimacy of the CCP.Footnote 3 Ecologically, the planners attempted to tackle the issue of ‘desiccationism’—that is, making a ‘connection between the depletion of tree cover and phenomena like droughts or soil erosion’Footnote 4—to preclude further loss of soil and thereby purify West Lake. Those two agendas were intimately related to each other, for keeping this body of water clean was diplomatically significant. Assigned a new role as ‘the Geneva of the East’ in Mao-era China,Footnote 5 Hangzhou and West Lake were designated as a venue for foreign affairs and a showcase of a peaceful and prosperous communist China. To borrow Matthew Johnson's words, this afforestation campaign was ‘part of a wider diplomatic policy’ that helped to legitimize the young republic internationally.Footnote 6

Given its nature as propaganda, I call this high-profile programme a ‘propaganda-campaign’ project because, first of all, it was designed to generate visible and tangible results—greener hills surrounding West Lake—for the sake of propaganda. Like many similar campaigns mounted in the early 1950s, however, this afforestation movement was a mere ‘continuation of processes already under way’, but the authorities purposely left an impression that they were ‘more abrupt in their inception and more widespread in their impact than was actually the case’.Footnote 7 In other words, showing a will to change to influence the masses’ perception of the new communist regime took on greater significance than what actually changed. Second, this project was launched as a response to the ongoing campaign ‘Making Green the Motherland’ (Lühua zuguo 绿化祖国). Officially starting in February 1956, the CCP called for a redoubled afforestation effort nationwide under the slogan of ‘Making Green the Motherland’ to attain dual goals: increasing the timber supply for China's industrialization and speeding up the collectivization movement in the countryside.Footnote 8

Third, although projects, as such, have long been dismissed for their astronomical costs that far outweighed their valueFootnote 9 or criticized for having led to fully fledged disasters,Footnote 10 I argue that the benefits brought about by a propaganda-campaign project were both political and economic. Politically, those projects were designed to familiarize the general populations with the operation of the socialist system—in this case, the mass mobilization of labourFootnote 11 and a will to conquer nature.Footnote 12 To borrow Peter Kenez's phrase, those projects were propaganda because they ‘helped to define’ what socialism in China was.Footnote 13 Denise Ho also posits that it functioned as both a ‘textbook’ and a ‘handbook’ of the communist revolution.Footnote 14 Economically and socially, the afforestation movement was intended to produce timber and other forestry goods. Those two goals were interrelated. Scholars recently found that propaganda in socialist regimes is not only repressive but also productive.Footnote 15 Along a similar vein, this article emphasizes propaganda's capacity to produce something for the purpose of popularizing socialist ideologies and improving the citizens’ living conditions, while simultaneously reorienting its participants’ lives and perceptions.

The study of the CCP's propaganda-campaign projects sheds light on one intriguing but somewhat puzzling aspect of recent scholarship on Mao's China—that is, the coexistence of competing narratives about the regime's accomplishments and the Party-state's failure to achieve its goals. This has been particularly true of the assessment of forestry in post-1949 China. While Jack Westboy praises the People's Republic of China (PRC) for instigating the ‘mightiest afforestation effort the world has ever seen’,Footnote 16 other scholars emphasize the Party-state's massive destruction of forests as emblematic of its hostile attitude towards nature.Footnote 17 As Geoffrey Murray and Ian Cook nicely put it, the CCP's successes on the environmental front and severe ecological problems existed side by side in Mao's China.Footnote 18

The coexistence of the two opposing views on the project of afforestation is in parallel with what Sigrid Schmalzer calls ‘two different kinds of truths’—namely, ‘the earlier, rosy account of science in socialist China’ and ‘the later, negative one’. Schmalzer contends that the former reflected ‘much optimism about socialism’ and the latter was a testimony to disillusionment caused ‘by the distortions of Mao's regime and the failures of socialism to live up to its many promises’. By contrasting the earlier optimism with the pervasive disillusionment that took place later, Schmalzer underscores the different temporal dimensions of the two truths.Footnote 19 By comparison, this study on the afforestation movement in the West Lake area shows that the two truths were produced not necessarily because of a time gap but as a result of two different approaches of assessment—or what Yi-fu Tuan calls two ‘views’.

If seen through a ‘vertical view’ (or from the angle of the upper echelon of state officials), propaganda-campaign projects were largely successful, but local inhabitants and communities—namely those who took the ‘side view’—had to cope with the various problems associated with them. In Yi-fu Tuan's analysis, the vertical view treats landscape as ‘a domain’ or ‘a work unit’, available for top-down planning, but the side view ‘sees landscape as space in which people act’.Footnote 20 The disparity between the blueprints drawn up by the higher authorities and individuals’ lived experiences constitutes the very essence of the present research on propaganda-campaign projects in Mao's China. On the one hand, the planning and the execution of such projects not only functioned as state-led propaganda, but also set up a framework within which local citizens negotiated with the state, shaped their subjectivities in socialism, and reaped the benefits from them. On the other hand, individuals at the local levels experienced and utilized the products of such projects in different ways than the political authorities had envisioned. It is true that the afforestation project at issue was a ‘form of participatory propaganda’ which demanded of local inhabitants that they take part.Footnote 21 However, it follows a question of how individuals at the local levels participated in and received it. As this article will show, this project fostered its own nonconformists: local inhabitants who were intent on protecting their own private properties vis-à-vis the collectivizing state, poachers who illegally felled trees for firewood and timber, and, most importantly, tea growers who were keen on expanding their tea plantations at the cost of mountain forests.

The account of the confrontation and interaction between state propaganda and villagers—or between the vertical and side views—leaves out a significant actor in the story of the afforestation movement in Hangzhou: non-humans—that is, trees and pests. As Anne Whiston Spirn cogently puts it, ‘humans are not the sole authors of landscape’. Other living creatures also contribute to the making of landscape and respond to its changes.Footnote 22 In the case of Hangzhou's afforestation movement, while the lower-than-expected density of pines caused concerns, pest infestation proved particularly catastrophic, essentially undermining the CCP's decades-long afforestation efforts. It thus came as no surprise that local officials drew a parallel between the damage inflicted by humans and havoc wreaked by bugs, labelling them the two most formidable foes.Footnote 23

West Lake

Located in the western part of Hangzhou, West Lake has a reputation as ‘paradise on earth’ for its mesmerizing beauty and poetic sensibilities which have inspired generations of writers and poets ever since the Tang dynasty (618–907). In consequence, West Lake and Hangzhou have long been a destination for upper-class travellers in imperial China. In the first half of the twentieth century, commercial tourism became the backbone of the city's economy after the completion of the Shanghai-Hangzhou railway. With the CCP's victory in China in sight by the late 1940s, the Party began to mount a campaign to transform ‘consumerist cities’, Hangzhou included, into ‘productive’ ones.Footnote 24 To respond to the central government's call, the Hangzhou government in the early 1950s vowed to bring the city's lucrative tourist industry to an end and instead make West Lake a productive space—‘a big fish pond’.Footnote 25

Thereafter, West Lake and Hangzhou were given a new role in the following three decades, that is, as a destination for political tourism: a resort for supreme CCP leaders, a centre known as ‘the Geneva of the East’ for international conferences, and the very location to host high-profile visitors. Indeed, the moniker of ‘the Geneva of the East’ was not the CCP's invention. Given Hangzhou's topographic features of a lake and surrounding mountains, it was compared with Geneva as early as the mid-1940s.Footnote 26 In the early 1950s, Tan Zhenlin 谭震林 (1902–1983), chair of Zhejiang,Footnote 27 and Wang Pingyi 王平夷 (1912–1970),Footnote 28 the chief Party leader in Hangzhou, resorted to the rhetoric of ‘the Geneva of the East,’ calling for an expedited building of facilities for tourists from both home and abroad, and the restoration of cultural relics. To this end, high-end hotels reserved for upper-echelon leaders and foreign guests, such as the Hangzhou Hotel (Hangzhou fandian 杭州饭店, est. 1956) and Liu Estate (Liuzhuang 刘庄, remodelled in 1953 and 1958), mushroomed, usually on the site of existing villas or monasteries. During the PRC's first three decades, Hangzhou hosted a large number of high-profile visitors from abroad, including Chairman Kliment Voroshilov (1881–1969) of the Soviet Union, President Sukarno (1901–1970) of Indonesia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) of Cambodia, and, finally, President Richard Nixon (1913–1994) of the United States (see Figure 3). Nixon spent a night at Liu Estate on 26 February 1972, weighing his words to finalize the path-breaking Shanghai Communique.Footnote 29

Figure 3. Nixon's visit to West Lake, 26 February 1972.

Source: Renmin huabao 人民画报 [People's Pictorial], No. 4 [the supplementary issue], 1972, p. 4.

The afforestation movement

As West Lake figured prominently in the CCP's state propaganda as the face of the new republic in Mao-era China, the Zhejiang and Hangzhou governments, which were constantly torn between making the city a productive space or a site for political tourism, invested heavily in numerous projects, including dredging West Lake (1952–1958), building or revamping lakeside gardens, and altering graves of ancient celebrities. Among all those high-budget programmes, the afforestation movement took on great importance to the conservancy of water in West Lake and the improvement of its water quality, as it fulfilled the goal of avoiding further soil erosion. To justify this time-consuming and costly campaign and to boost the call for mass participation, the media painted a bleak picture of forestry in the Hangzhou area before 1949: the scarcity of woodlands was exacerbated during the Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945) when the Japanese occupiers, as well as the poverty-stricken residents, ruthlessly cut down trees, especially pines, in nearby hills.Footnote 30 A striking contrast between an ecologically degraded China before the Liberation and a greener China during the PRC times thus symbolized the temporal gap between ‘old China’ and ‘new China’. In Nicolai Volland's words, socialism ‘became present as much as future’, whereas its ‘Other (the West, capitalism) became the past, both their own past, now left behind, and that of global history’.Footnote 31 Thus, it is no wonder that reports on deforestation in Taiwan (the PRC's ‘Other’) in the 1950s resembled the description of the massive disappearance of forests in pre-1949 Hangzhou, drawing a parallel between pre-Liberation China and present-day Taiwan.Footnote 32

Blaming pre-1949 governments in Hangzhou for purposely damaging forests or not putting in any afforestation effort were unfounded accusations. Shortly after the war against Japan had ended, for example, the GMD government had instituted a ten-year afforestation programme in Hangzhou. A government report shows that the Hangzhou authorities had planned to afforest about 15,000 mu (1,000 hectares) or over 20 per cent of land surrounding West Lake in 1949 alone. With the GMD's defeat in the civil war, the plan never came to fruition. Like its CCP counterpart, the GMD's municipal government in Hangzhou also issued injunctions against unauthorized woodcutting, quarrying, and tomb building in the lakeside hills to protect mountainous woodlands.Footnote 33

In the opening years of the 1950s, the CCP authorities adopted a similar protective approach known as ‘closing hillsides to facilitate afforestation’ (fengshan yulin 封山育林). This method entailed sealing off hills to prevent livestock and humans from grazing and gathering fuel to allow saplings to grow. With additional human efforts to nurture trees, semi-artificial woodlands could thus be created.Footnote 34 A government institution known as the Committee of Protecting Forests in Hilly Area of West Lake (Xihu shanqu hulin weiyuanhui 西湖山区护林委员会) was established in late 1949.Footnote 35 It aimed at mobilizing the masses to reverse a trend of wanton tree felling in this region. A report filed in 1950 pointed the finger not just at the inhabitants of the hills who sneaked into the mountains to gather firewood and steal saplings: more seriously, People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers in Hangzhou shipped truckloads of timber or firewood from the mountains to save costs and help their productive work. The Committee created 102 protection teams with 1,866 members to guard against woodcutters, gatherers, and poachers. The same report confirmed that by the end of 1950, 13,373 mu (891.53 hectares) of hilly areas had been shut off.Footnote 36

The Committee could not have reached its goals without the full support of the municipal and provincial governments. Tan Zhenlin gave an order on 19 April 1950 instructing government institutions, schools, and the PLA in Hangzhou to cease felling trees to reclaim woodlands in both the mountainous areas and scenic spots close to West Lake.Footnote 37 Between 1950 and 1953, the ban on entering the mountains was lifted between early April and late December on an annual basis, permitting the locals and tea growers to gather firewood to use as fuel in their day-to-day lives and for tea production.Footnote 38 Throughout Mao's times, three surveys were conducted to assess the effectiveness of the programme of ‘closing hillsides to facilitate afforestation’ in 1950, 1959, and 1975. In the Mount Jade Emperor (Yuhuang shan 玉皇山) area, for example, the examiners saw mostly stumps, weeds, and eroded soil in 1950. By 1959, buds had reportedly begun to appear on the stumps, while newly planted saplings were growing fast and had begun the canopy closure process. Sixteen years later, the same area was found to have become a grove with a certain degree of biodiversity consisting of white oaks, sawtooth oaks, camphor, Schima superba, pines, and other trees whose average diameters measured between eight and 16 centimetres and canopy density amounted to 0.6–0.8.Footnote 39

Within 65,000 mu (4,333.33 hectares) of hillside areas in the mountains surrounding West Lake, 10,000 mu (666.67 hectares) turned out to be forests created under the programme of ‘closing hillsides to facilitate afforestation’. The majority of the land (51,000 mu or 3,400 hectares) was covered with man-made forests developed since the opening years of the PRC.Footnote 40 Woodlands grown out of the plan of ‘closing hillsides to facilitate afforestation’ differ considerably from monoculture tree plantations in that the former are semi-artificial with limited human intervention, whereas the latter are single-crop cultivation requiring maximal labour input.

It was the outlook for developing monoculture tree plantations that boosted the Hangzhou municipal government's confidence in drawing up a plan in 1950 to complete greening 65,000 mu of mountainous woodlands in five years,Footnote 41 but the campaign proved far more time-consuming. Calling for the participation of soldiers, cadres, students, and citizens of Hangzhou was a standard way to initiate, sustain, and accelerate the afforestation movements, as their mobilization enabled them to arrive at a full understanding of what mass movements were. Students from various schools in Hangzhou were usually subject to mass mobilization. Their service to the movement of greening the West Lake area was occasionally rewarded with naming rights. A woodland near Yellow Dragon Cave (Huanglong dong 黄龙洞), for example, was named ‘Junior's Grove’ (Shaonian lin 少年林) on Children's Day in 1955.Footnote 42 In a six-year period between 1956 and 1961, the number of volunteer labourers enrolled from Hangzhou amounted to 808,000.Footnote 43

The afforestation campaigns were thus the embodiment of a unique mode of production in the early years of the PRC—what Miriam Gross calls ‘mass effort’Footnote 44—that entailed intensifying labour input to overcome the scarcity of material resources without incurring a high cost. Jack Westboy attributes the PRC's success in afforesting China to the part-time engagement of ‘tens of millions of Chinese’ in ‘forestry activities’.Footnote 45 Voluntary labourers were, however, not expected to achieve high efficiency. Given that a key aspect of propaganda is not to convince ‘people to do what they did not want to do’,Footnote 46 but serves instead as a ‘ritual of loyalty’,Footnote 47 the very action of participation, not the labourers’ work rate, matters most.

In reality, the best solution to accelerate afforestation was to select fast-growing tree species, particularly maweisong 马尾松 or the horsetail pine (Pinus massoniana). The choice was not randomly made. Hailed as the ‘most ecologically and economically significant tree genus’ across the globe and a plantation tree that grows ‘in harsh environments that are cold and/or dry’,Footnote 48 the pine is widely distributed in regions south of the Yellow River in China.Footnote 49 The abovementioned ten-year afforestation plan carried out by the GMD government in the late 1940s also placed a premium on cultivating the horsetail pine.Footnote 50 Not surprisingly, it soon topped the list of designated tree species for speedy afforestation recommended by CCP officials after the Liberation.Footnote 51 Among all its advantages, it was the knowledge of this pine's exceedingly high growth rate and ability to endure harsh surroundings that prompted local officials in Hangzhou to choose it as the mainstay tree for the afforestation movements in the early years of the PRC.Footnote 52

A second factor behind the CCP government's consideration of pines as the mainstay tree genus was a long-time cultural tradition in Hangzhou. A report filed by a botanist in 1964 reminded that poets in the Tang dynasty, such as Bai Juyi 白居易 (777–846), composed poems in praise of pines. Ever since the Tang and Song (960–1279) dynasties, some scenic spots had been defined by the existence of pine groves.Footnote 53 Pine was a favourite theme in paintings, poems, and prose in imperial China because the imagery of rugged pines symbolized the gentry's special temperament: an agonistic ethos and an uncompromising attitude.Footnote 54 In actuality, the Hangzhou authorities were keenly aware of the necessity of cultivating specific species to fit the cultural heritage of certain regions. In Yunqi 云栖, for example, a large stretch of bamboo groves was created, while osmanthus trees were reintroduced to Manjuelong 满觉陇.Footnote 55 Historically, bamboos at Yunqi and sweet-scented osmanthus at Manjuelong had elicited poetic sentiments and long appealed to tourists and visitors. It merits mentioning here that the recuperation of China's cultural tradition—the selection of trees in this case—carried particular politico-cultural ramifications within the socialist bloc in this period: socialist cosmopolitanism during the Cold War era ironically celebrated ‘formerly isolated traditions’ across the globe.Footnote 56 Hence, the sense of nationalist particularism itself was generated ‘outside the evolving nations’ in the context of political universalism.Footnote 57

Given the economic, cultural, and political significance of pine cultivation in the West Lake area, pine forests—mainly those of the horsetail pine—dominated in Hangzhou during the first three decades of the PRC's existence. By 1964, two-thirds of hillside lands in the West Lake area were blanketed with horsetail pines.Footnote 58 In 1977, the percentage dipped after other species were introduced during the ensuing afforestation movements. Despite such notable success, pine plantations in the West Lake area were not without their problems. Other than pest infestations, which I will discuss at length later in this article, the horsetail pine was notorious for its low survival rate in this region. A 1950 survey revealed that its average survival rate was 60 per cent, 10 to 30 per cent lower than that of other trees.Footnote 59 As a matter of fact, 60 per cent might be an overblown number to begin with. Vaclav Smil, for example, estimates that the success rate of afforestation across China was a mere 30 per cent.Footnote 60 Even though it was very likely that the survival rate in Hangzhou was far higher than that of the entire country, the fact remains that Hangzhou-based foresters found it hard to keep horsetail pines alive in the long term.

Given the afforestation movement's role in propaganda, the low survival rate of trees was understandable, or even foreseeable, as the initial massive labour mobilization was more ‘visible’, or a better fit, for media coverage than the long, slow process of upkeep. In 1957, local cadres began to express their concerns over the poor state of the horsetail pine groves. Given the pressing need for accelerated afforestation in the early 1950s, most, if not all, of the pines were hastily planted. Necessary silvicultural works, such as thinning, were largely ignored. In consequence, trees were throwing out branches rampantly, and the spacing between them was uncomfortably small.Footnote 61 A separate study conducted in 1964 identified a new problem: the inability of saplings to grow up. The researcher explained that at the age of 15 or so pine trees could theoretically be mature enough to shed seeds and, accordingly, new trees would grow. Unfortunately, his observation of several sections of woodland kept disappointing him. In a space of 16m2, for example, he saw 12 saplings in May 1964. Upon returning in September, he was upset to find that those saplings had either died or vanished—none had survived. The researcher thus attributed the grove's lack of reproductive ability to a number of factors, including an undesired high canopy density, bad landform, poaching by nearby villagers, and animals’ activities.Footnote 62

Hence, this report revealed a chilling fact about afforestation in this region—namely, the lack of well-thought-out planning and proper management of the mountain forests/plantations. In this sense, most horsetail pine plantations could hardly belong in the category of modern scientific forestry in the strictest sense, which is characterized by ‘clean-weeded, even-aged, and regimented rows of export corps’.Footnote 63 The absence of efficient management also manifested itself in the fact that those forests slipped from excessively high density to relatively low density within a decade. The 1964 report discovered that, on average, each hectare of woodland featured 2,096 pine trees under ten years old.Footnote 64 As a comparison, CCP administrators in Beijing had set a goal nationwide to plant 10,000 to 12,000 saplings with a survival rate of 90 per cent.Footnote 65 The real-life scenario, however, is that the density of a ten-year-old pine forest was between 3,900 and 4,500 per hectare during the PRC era.Footnote 66 Such a low density in the West Lake area once again hinted at an underwhelming survival rate.

The issues

The low survival rate of trees planted in the lakeside hills resulted, in part, from human factors, namely the mismanagement of local villagers and cadres. However, non-human factors were hardly negligible. Throughout Mao's times, both human and non-human actors competed with planners and foresters, and thereby kept derailing Hangzhou's afforestation campaign.

Ownership rights

From day one of the PRC era, the CCP's cadres in the West Lake area faced a grave problem of poorly defined land ownership in the mountains adjacent to the lake. Although land reform was conducted immediately following Liberation in an attempt to give inhabitants in the mountains land for planting trees, land ownership was complicated and confusing, in no small part because of the landholdings of religious institutions (chiefly Buddhist temples). As the CCP had abolished the ownership rights of monasteries as early as 1947,Footnote 67 the land rights of hillside lands formerly under the control of Buddhist priests had become a grey area after the majority of monks had disrobed and fled Hangzhou for fear of religious persecution, leaving large chunks of land unattended. The occupation of some temples by government and military institutions also precluded local officials from properly managing their affiliated lands.Footnote 68 Under these circumstances, the CCP government classified the mountain land into three categories for afforestation. First, the owners of privately owned hillside were responsible for planting trees. Second, in lands originally possessed by monasteries, individual foresters partnered with the government to engage in afforestation. Third, PLA soldiers, government clerks, schoolteachers, and students undertook tree planting in areas inaccessible to local dwellers.Footnote 69

The local government also promulgated a regulation as early as 1949 to further encourage the first category, namely owners of private land, and the second category, namely participants in joint afforestation, to plant more trees by promising to share revenues.Footnote 70 The 1949 regulation, however, failed to appease the disgruntled villagers who continued to claim their rights in the mountains. Soon a controversy surfaced as the 1949 regulation did not take into account woodcutters’ and herdsmen's usufruct rights, causing bitter animosity between tree planters and woodcutters and herdsmen. Moreover, the proprietorship of some mountains remained unclear, allowing multiple parties to wrestle with one another for the rights to a single mountain. Under those circumstances, a new regulation was enacted in 1952, which attempted to draw clear-cut lines between the three categories mentioned above.Footnote 71

The agricultural collectivization movement that began in the mid-1950s further complicated ownership rights and thereby demoralized foresters in the West Lake area as well as in other parts of Zhejiang. As the collectivization campaign prevailed, the ownership of trees that local inhabitants had been cultivating for years became a sticking point. A report filed in 1956 revealed that trees were indiscriminately brought down in some areas because they, just like land, had been labelled public property. Hence, the local villagers obtained inadequate—or even no—compensation for handing over land and trees to join the cooperatives.Footnote 72 In consequence, a contributor to a journal in mid-1956 re-emphasized the ruling that it was unnecessary to confiscate the villagers’ scattered trees in the process of collectivizing the countryside.Footnote 73 The ruling, nonetheless, fell on deaf ears. By the summer of 1957, a Zhejiang-based agriculture official reported that 70 per cent of woodlands remained unincorporated into the newly established communes because local CCP leaders tended to make low appraisals of trees initially possessed by foresters. In response, the villagers began to cut down trees on a massive scale before the communes could seize them at unfair prices.Footnote 74

Groves originally possessed by Buddhist temples, which constituted the majority of all hillside woodlands, posed a different problem. By rule, the state appropriated and managed all such lands, but various cooperatives and production brigades proclaimed that their members had kept tending the ancient trees therein for years, and they were therefore entitled to receive the revenues from those lands. The clash between local governments and collectives intensified and remained unresolved by the mid-1960s.Footnote 75 Occasionally, such controversies escalated into armed conflicts.Footnote 76 As late as 1974, an archival record shows that the People's Commune of West Lake (Xihu renmin gongshe 西湖人民公), the administrative unit of the West Lake region for most years of Mao's era, constantly vied with various production brigades under its control for land ownership of woods in the lakeside hills.Footnote 77

Such ill-defined and contested rights to lands and trees led to illegal felling, which was usually interpreted as poaching by the local authorities. As shown above, some of this tree cutting could be understood as the individual villagers’ defiance of the state's imposition of collectivization. Towards the end of the Great Leap Forward movement, abject poverty impelled some local inhabitants to secretly cut down ‘publicly owned’ trees in mountains and exchange timber for cash. When the provincial leadership in Zhejiang finally decided to severely punish a few offenders as a stern warning in 1961, one of the poachers was found to be a Party committee member of a production brigade.Footnote 78 During the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the mismanagement of mountain forests worsened because of the disfunction of government and judiciary institutions. A report filed in 1968 revealed that hundreds of jobless young men and women in their twenties organized themselves to raid woodlands in the mountains beside West Lake. Cherry blossom trees and bamboos in Mount Jade Emperor had been wiped out, and timber and firewood were illegally sold. The reporter estimated that 10 per cent of trees had disappeared.Footnote 79 In sum, forests in the Hangzhou area endured three major waves of sabotage: 1958 when timber and fuel were in enormous demand for smelting steel, 1960–1962 when the economy collapsed, and the early Cultural Revolution period when local governments were in paralysis.Footnote 80

The rivalry between tea growers and foresters

The stories about wiping out trees in the West Lake region were a testimony to the unabated tension between afforestation and agriculture in post-1949 China. Across the entire country, the afforestation movement, which compelled national or even international attention and thereby served an explicit propaganda purpose, could not mask the less publicized story of the massive loss of forests for the sake of providing fuel and supplying farmlands by the end of Mao's times.Footnote 81 Across China, the alternating between afforestation and deforestation led to the expansion of farmland from about 80 million hectares to 120–130 million by 1980.Footnote 82

In the West Lake area, it was not necessarily farmers, but tea growers who clashed with foresters and rangers competing for space. In reality, developing tea production in the Hangzhou region was not a lesser programme for propaganda. Hangzhou-made tea was the favourite beverage of the CCP's top-echelon leaders, such as Zhou Enlai 周恩来 (1898–1976) and Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇 (1898–1969).Footnote 83 Moreover, the demand for Hangzhou-made tea as gifts on foreign affairs occasions soared, especially after the normalization of the diplomatic relationship between China and countries of the Western bloc in Mao's final years. Meanwhile, some lakeside tea-producing villages, especially Meijiawu 梅家坞, gained Premier Zhou Enlai's favour as a model collectivized tea farm to show foreign visitors the glaring success of China's agricultural collectivization movement.Footnote 84

Technically, tea bushes could be counted as vegetation during the ‘greening’ movement. In reality, Hangzhou-based officials refused to take them into account in the early stages of the afforestation movement, partly because the importance of tea production in Hangzhou was hardly recognized in the early years of the PRC. Considering the limited space in the West Lake area, in December 1951 municipal planners allocated a modest amount of land (up to 20 hectares) to build up tea plantations.Footnote 85 It is thus no wonder that tea peasants complained in the mid-1950s that their lands had been encroached upon for various reasons, especially by the ongoing afforestation campaign. The president of Beijing Agriculture University (Beijing nognye daxue 北京农业大学) conducted an investigation in Hangzhou in 1957 and concluded that tea plantations had lost enormous lands for the project of ‘Making Green the Motherland’.Footnote 86 Hangzhou's deputy mayor similarly admitted in 1957 that tea growers’ interests had been infringed upon over the years, but he found it impossible to deforest some afforested areas as compensation to those tea farmers.Footnote 87

Several years into the RRC era, tea's importance loomed large as a beverage and a gift in the political arena, and tea cultivation in the Hangzhou area accordingly gained greater leverage. Statistics show that the size of tea plantations across Hangzhou increased by six times between 1949 and 1976.Footnote 88 Although I do not have the figures about tea fields in the West Lake area during Mao's times, it was clear that they also underwent remarkable growth. The acreage of tea plantations in Longjin 龙井, one of the dozens of villages/production brigades under the control of the People's Commune of West Lake, amounted to 267 hectares in 1959, as opposed to the planned 200 hectares for the entire West Lake region estimated by the local authorities in 1951.Footnote 89 Similarly, the acreage of tea plantations in Meijiawu, another village, was scheduled to increase by 30 per cent in 1964.Footnote 90 Not all newfound tea fields came from reclaimed wastelands as the CCP officials had envisioned in 1957. In Longjin, for example, six hectares of paddy fields were transformed into tea fields under the authorization of the Hangzhou government in 1961.Footnote 91

Besides schemes to garner new space for tea production endorsed by the local authorities, plans to steal lands without official authorization were afoot in various villages throughout Mao's times. A local cadre observed that tea growers’ keenness to acquire more lands to cultivate tea stemmed from the high population density in the West Lake area: the acreage of arable lands per capita was 0.04 hectare in the 1970s, compelling tea producers to carve out more space, legally or illegally, from woodlands.Footnote 92 Between 1960 and 1962, for example, about 133 hectares of forest were erased. On most occasions, tea peasants, without the approval of their superiors, did not grab land with great fanfare, but resorted to the tactic of ‘nibbling up’ (canshi 蚕食)—that is, occupying piece by piece—woodlands.Footnote 93 Well into the 1970s, the tea peasants’ nibbling up of forests did not end, despite an injunction issued by local governments. A report filed in 1979, for example, confirmed that 50.6 hectares of groves in the West Lake region had been removed by local tea farmers, with the disappearance of over 20,000 trees.Footnote 94

Pest infestation: pine both

Conflicts between the customary usufruct rights to grazing and pasture (in Hangzhou's case, it was tea growers’ rights) and modern, scientific forestry are universal in various cultural and social contexts;Footnote 95 in much the same way, pest infestation has also been a commonplace predicament in monoculture forests.Footnote 96 Given the almost exclusive cultivation of horsetail pines in the West Lake area, pine moths were the most serious menace in this region in the first three decades of the PRC. In the early 1950s, pine moths were discovered only sporadically. As the afforestation movement unfolded, the pine moth infestation grew exponentially in Hangzhou as well as in other parts of Zhejiang. Across Zhejiang, for example, pine moths assaulted around 16,133 hectares of pine forests each year between 1951 and 1955. The acreages affected skyrocketed to 93,800 hectares per annum between 1971 and 1975, and to 231,467 in the 1980s.Footnote 97 Generally speaking, pine moth infestation constituted about 80 per cent of pest infestation in Hangzhou as well as other parts of Zhejiang.Footnote 98

For the rangers and ordinary villagers, the outbreaks of pine moth infestation constitute a bloodcurdling memory. Research conducted in 1956 found that an adult pine moth was capable of devouring over 20 pine needles in a single day. Pine trees were decimated in woodlands attacked by pine moths. Even trees that were fortunate enough to survive pine moths could not grow normally.Footnote 99 A report filed in 1968 vividly portrayed the outbreak of pine moth infestation that haunted the West Lake area:

Pine forests have generally fallen prey to pine moths. The area hit [by the infestation] amounts to 3,000 mu (200 hectares). In some extreme cases, [one can see] over 1,400 moths crawling in one single tree … In those infestation-affected areas, pine needles have been eaten up, as if [the trees] were burnt down …

[When] the next generation [of pine moths] are hatched, [they] have … spread to the entire mountain forest in West Lake, of which horsetail pine woodlands constitute 70 per cent. Once [those horsetail pine trees] fall victim, not only will the decade-long afforestation effort come to naught, the landscape of West Lake will also be affected …

42,000 mu (2,800 hectares) of horsetail pine forests have, to varying degrees, been damaged [by pine moths] at present.Footnote 100

More often than not, the lack of insecticide and other pesticidal technologies exacerbated pine moth infestation. Under those circumstances, local governments in Zhejiang usually intensified labour input to overcome such deficiencies in the technology throughout the 1950s, the 1960s, and even the 1970s. The author of the abovementioned 1968 report, for example, proposed mobilizing the local inhabitants to ‘manually catch bugs’ (rengong buchong 人工捕虫) in woodlands near West Lake.Footnote 101 To provide the participants with incentives, local cadres in some counties in Zhejiang devised a plan to exchange moths for cash. Despite combining a political approach of massive labour mobilization and a monetary incentive, this pest control campaign not only failed to motivate the half-hearted villagers but also provided a means for them to reap profits at the cost of the campaign. A witness report shows:

This said village mobilized its villagers three times last year … [The villagers] were paid by the amounts [of the pine moth] … In consequence, in the process of pest control, [villagers] displayed a tendency of catching big bugs but not small ones, catching [moths perching on] low branches but not [those inhabiting] higher boughs, and catching [those] easy [to catch] but not [those] difficult [to catch]. Pest infestation has, therefore, not come to an end.Footnote 102

This account constitutes a counter-narrative to the efficacy of ‘mass effort’, a defining character of socialist labour organization, attesting to the yawning gap between the pronounced intention of state propaganda and the everyday realities of participants in and users of those propaganda-campaign projects. The villagers’ participation in the movement while seeking to serve their own interests thus provides an arresting example of what Gao Wangling calls ‘counter-action’ (fan xingwei 反行为),Footnote 103 that is, Chinese peasants’ attitudes of ‘getting by’ socialism vis-à-vis a repressive and interventionist state.Footnote 104

Pest infestation: the Japanese pine bast scale (Matsucoccus matsumurae [Kuwana.])

Compared with the pine moth, the Japanese pine bast scale (Riben songganjie 日本松干蚧, Matsucoccus matsumurae [Kuwana.]) was a relatively new pest but from the 1960s it created more severe problems than Hangzhou's horsetail pine. Originating in Japan, this invasive pest was said to have appeared first in Shandong and then in some other Chinese provinces, including Zhejiang, as early as the 1950s.Footnote 105 Around 1966, the Japanese pine bast scale was finally identified in the mountain forests beside West Lake.Footnote 106 By 1972, confirmation came that it was the very cause of massive damage to horsetail pine forests in the West Lake area.Footnote 107 That year, about 4.66 million pine trees were reportedly affected by the Japanese pine bast scale, of which 2.33 million had been proclaimed dead, with the remaining trees in a critical condition. In other words, about 388 hectares of pine woodlands (namely, one-third of those in the West Lake Scenic Zone) had been destroyed by this tiny bug. Beyond the West Lake area, the Japanese pine bast scale was held to be responsible for the demise of 63.9 per cent of horsetail pines in other parts of Hangzhou in 1972. The author of a 1980 report recalled that local cadres were concerned not only with the massive death of trees but also with the changed look of the scenic zone because of the apparent disappearance of pine trees. In their words, given West Lake's unparalleled significance as a site for foreign visitors in the 1970s, the loss of trees had ‘caused a negative effect upon foreign affairs’.Footnote 108 By the end of 1973, this uncontrolled pest infestation ruined about 2,000 hectares of pine groves and brought down around 300,000 trees, essentially wiping out all horsetail forests in the West Lake area.Footnote 109

To cope with the worsening situation, officials and entomologists from various provinces made a concerted effort to unmask the mechanism of the destruction wreaked by the Japanese pine bast scale in the wake of the outbreak of this pest infestation. Studies that proliferated in the early and mid-1970s found that it is, in reality, a type of scale insect the size of a grain of sesame. It parasitizes the gaps of trunks or branches of the pine trees to suck up tree-sap, thereby dehydrating the branches. It can reproduce two or three generations a year, with its eggs spread via wind, water, and human activities.Footnote 110 Researchers, meanwhile, came up with various solutions to the infestation. During a meeting on the Japanese pine bast scale held in December 1973, delegations from Liaoning, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang suggested that this pest could be killed with the application of the fluoroacetamide solvent. Furthermore, some insects, such as Harmonia axyridis and Brumus mongol, were its natural enemy.Footnote 111 As time went by, more natural enemies were identified and, more importantly, studies on different variants of the Japanese pine bast scale were conducted throughout the 1970s, allowing for a thorough understanding of this hitherto unknown pest.Footnote 112 Nonetheless, despite progress made by scientific researchers, villagers at the local level remained ignorant of the basics of pest control techniques. An observer was disturbed to witness villagers selling firewood cut from Japanese pine bast scale-infested pine trees in 1976 without a proper understanding of the risk of spreading this pernicious bug.Footnote 113

Conclusion

In essence, the afforestation campaign in the West Lake region was a propaganda-campaign project, for it was engineered to legitimize the CCP's rule both domestically and internationally. To arrive at a fuller understanding of such programmes, I have followed Sigrid Schmalzer's analysis of ‘two different kinds of truths’.Footnote 114 On the one hand, the afforestation campaign attained some of its goals as millions of trees were planted, albeit at immense financial cost and labour input, and the general population was afforded an opportunity to be immersed in the Party's policies and participate in voluntary labour, a defining feature of the socialist labour organization. On the other hand, local villagers and cadres variously subscribed to the Party's agenda, went along with this campaign, or reaped their own benefits. Tea growers who secretly stole land from pine plantations and labourers who were mobilized by political authorities but focused their attention only on catching bugs in exchange for cash exemplify what Gao Wangling calls fan xingwei (‘counter-action’) which pervaded the countryside of Mao-era China—that is, peasants’ pursuit of their own aims at the expense of the Party's policies.Footnote 115

When offsetting the effects of the afforestation agendas advanced by the political authorities, the villagers did not harbour an intention to resist the authoritarian regime. In this sense, their agency was ‘non-purposive’ in nature as it was not driven by conscious and purposive actions but resulted from their actions.Footnote 116 Of late, scholars have underscored peasants’ agency in defying state-initiated programmes in Mao's China, by not attending meetings, refusing to work,Footnote 117 hiding crops, borrowing funds, and appropriating unregistered lands.Footnote 118 By comparison, this article also highlights the agency of non-human actors, namely trees and pests. When the Hangzhou-based officials juxtaposed bugs with poachers as this propaganda-campaign project's chief foes, it is clear that such non-purposive agency possessed by both humans and non-humans led to severe consequences in real life, and from time to time compelled the CCP authorities to respond by adjusting their policies accordingly. In other words, human and non-human actors were not intent upon challenging the afforestation policies, but their actions simply ‘[got] in the way of [political] domination’.Footnote 119

It merits mentioning that such non-purposive agency of both humans and non-humans was a consequence of their interaction with, response to, and internalization of the Party's policies, but was capable of profoundly affecting planners and executors of propaganda-campaign projects. In other words, the afforestation movement in the Hangzhou area ended up creating its human opponents and non-human foes and thereby fell victim to its own success. Or, in David Harvey's words, this afforestation campaign had its ‘share of ecologically based difficulties’.Footnote 120 Hence, this study of the propaganda-campaign project helps to avoid a binary of the two truths about success and disaster in discussing China's afforestation in Mao's times: they are merely two sides of the same coin.

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66 Gao Zhaowei 高兆蔚, Senlin ziyuan jingying guanli yanjiu 森林资源经营管理研究 (Studies on the Administration and Management of Forestry Resources) (Fuzhou: Fujian sheng ditu chubanshe, 2004), p. 231.

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68 ‘Hangzhou shi renmin zhengfu jianshe ju dui Xihu fengjingqu guanli de yijian’ 杭州市人民政府建设局对西湖风景区管理的意见 (Opinions of the construction bureau of the Hangzhou municipal government on management of the West Lake scenic district), in Xihu wenxian jicheng di 12 ce, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo chengli 50 nian Xihu wenxian zhuanji (Collection of Literatures about West Lake, Book 12, Special Issue of Literatures about West Lake in 50 Years since the Founding of PRC), (ed.) Wang Guoping (Hangzhou: Hangzhou chubanshe, 2004), pp. 6–7.

69 Shi, Xihu zhi, p. 815.

70 Dai Shanzhong 戴善忠 and Luo Ping 络平, ‘Hangzhou yuanlin fagui yilanbiao’ 杭州园林法规一览表 (A general table of regulations on gardening in Hangzhou), in Xihu fengjing yuanlin (1949–1989) 西湖风景园林（1949–1989）(Landscape and Gardening in West Lake, 1949–1989), (ed.) Hangzhou shi yuanlin wenwu guanliju 杭州市园林文物局 (Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu chubanshe, 1990), p. 494.

71 The Zhejiang Provincial Archives, J117-005-067, p. 33.

72 ‘Tuoshan chuli linmu rushe wenti shi dangqian fangzhi luankan lanfa de guanjian’ 妥善处理林木入社问题是当前防止乱砍滥伐的关键 (Properly handling the issue of [villagers’] joining cooperatives with woodlands and trees is the key to precluding wanton felling of trees), Zhejiang linye tongxun 浙江林业通讯, no. 4, July 1956, pp. 1–2.

73 Wang Yi 王毅, ‘Weishenme lingxing shumu buyao rushe?’ 为什么另星树木不要入社？ (Why shouldn't scattered trees join the collectives?), Zhejiang linye tongxun 浙江林业通讯, no. 3, May 1956, p. 1.

74 Huadong shifan daxue Zhongguo dangdaishi yanjiu zhongxin 华东师范大学中国当代史研究中, Zhongguo dangdai minjian shiliao jikan 14 Sha Wenhan gongzuo biji 1957–1958 nian 中国当代民间史料集刊14沙文汉工作笔记1957–1958年 (Collected Works of Non-governmental Historical Materials in Contemporary China, No. 14, Sha Wenhan's Work Journal, 1957–1958) (Shanghai: Shanghai dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2016), p. 272.

75 ‘Hangzhou shi renmin zhengfu jianshe ju dui Xihu fengjingqu guanli de yijian’, p. 442; The Hangzhou Municipal Archives, J115-003-010-055, p. 4.

76 The Zhejiang Provincial Archives, J116-006-033, p. 33.

77 The Hangzhou Municipal Archives, 071-006-011, p. 8.

78 Yu, ‘Hangzhou jiefang hou 17 nianjian de yuanlin jianshe’, pp. 154–156.

79 The Hangzhou Municipal Archives, 071-004-0038, pp. 13–15.

80 Hangzhou nongye zhi 杭州农业志 (Annals of Agriculture in Hangzhou) (Beijing: Fangzhi chubanshe, 2003), p. 666.

81 Murray and Cook, Green China, p. 49.

82 Marks, China, p. 270.

83 Shi, Xihu zhi, pp. 115–117.

84 Xin Wei 辛薇, Dianran jiyi: Hangzhou liushi nian 点燃记忆：杭州六十年 (Igniting Memory: Six Decades in Hangzhou) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2009), p. 51.

85 ‘Xihu fengjing qu jianshe jihua dagang (chugao)’ 西湖风景建设计划大纲（初稿）(The outline of the construction plan in the West Lake scenic zone), in Xihu wenxian jicheng di 12 ce, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo chengli 50 nian Xihu wenxian zhuanji (Collection of Literatures about West Lake, Book 12, Special Issue of Literatures about West Lake in 50 Years since the Founding of PRC), (ed.) Wang Guoping (Hangzhou: Hangzhou chubanshe, 2004), p. 78.

86 Huadong shifan daxue Zhongguo dangdaishi yanjiu zhongxin, Zhongguo dangdai minjian shiliao jikan 14 Sha Wenhan gongzuo biji 1957–1958 nian, p. 92.

87 ‘Jiejue Xihu jianshe yu kuozhan chadi de maodun’ 解决西湖建设与扩展茶地的矛盾 (Resolving the contradiction between building up West Lake and expanding tea fields), Hangzhou ribao, 4 May 1957.

88 Hangzhou nongye zhi, p. 639.

89 ‘Hangzhou shi yuanlin jianshe shinian lai de zhuyao chengjiu (chugao)’, p. 180.

90 The Zhejiang Provincial Archives, J116-020-064, p. 46; J116-018-345, p. 108.

91 Ibid., J116-016-066, p. 415.

92 ‘Xihu shanqu zaolin lühua de qingkuang’ 西湖山区造林绿化的情况 (On afforestation and [the movement of] making green in the mountainous area of West Lake), in Xihu wenxian jicheng di 12 ce, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo chengli 50 nian Xihu wenxian zhuanji (Collection of Literatures about West Lake, Book 12, Special Issue of Literatures about West Lake in 50 Years since the Founding of PRC), (ed.) Wang Guoping (Hangzhou: Hangzhou chubanshe, 2004), p. 441.

93 The Zhejiang Provincial Archives, J115-003-010, pp. 55–56.

94 ‘Guanyu Xihu fengjing qu de diaocha baogao—sheng, shi jingji diaocha zu diaocha cailiao zhi'er’ 关于西湖风景区的调查报告—省、市经济调查组调查材料之二 (Investigative report on the West Lake scenic district—the investigative material of the investigative group of provincial and municipal economy, no. 2), in Xihu wenxian jicheng di 12 ce, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo chengli 50 nian Xihu wenxian zhuanji (Collection of Literatures about West Lake, Book 12, Special Issue of Literatures about West Lake in 50 Years since the Founding of PRC), (ed.) Wang Guoping (Hangzhou: Hangzhou chubanshe, 2004), p. 287.

95 Watkins, Charles, Trees, Woods and Forests: A Social and Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), p. 205Google Scholar.

96 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 20.

97 Zhejiang sheng linye zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui 浙江省林业志编纂委员会, Zhejiang sheng linye zhi 浙江省林业志 (Chronicle of Forestry in Zhejiang) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001), p. 468.

98 Ye Songfu 叶松甫, ‘Buyao ba songmaochong chiguo de songshu dou kanle’ 不要把松毛虫吃过的松树都砍了 (Don't cut down all pine trees eaten by pine moths), Zhejiang linye tongxun 浙江林业通讯, no. 3, March 1957, back cover.

99 Que Xiuru 阙秀如, ‘Fangzhi songmaochong’ 防治松毛虫 (Prevention and cure of pine moth infestation), Kexue dazhong 科学大众, 27 September 1956, p. 415.

100 The Hangzhou Municipal Archives, 071-004-0038, pp. 19–22.

101 Ibid., p. 23.

102 ‘Jiangshan xian Miaolizhen xiang Geshan she kaizhan zhi songmaochong de qingkuang jieshao’ 江山县妙里圳乡葛山社开展治松毛虫的情况介绍 (Report on the situation of carrying out [the campaign of] treating pine moth [infestation] in Geshan Cooperative, Miaolizhen Village, Jiangshan County), Zhejiang linye tongxun 浙江林业通讯, no. 2, April 1956, p. 39.

103 Gao Wangling 高王凌, Renmin gongshe shiqi Zhongguo nongmin ‘fan xingwei’ diaocha 人民公社时期中国农民‘反行为’调查 (An Investigation into Chinese Peasants’ Counter-Action during the Times of the People's Commune) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 2006), p. 3.

104 Timothy Johnston notes that citizens in the communist regimes neither supported nor resisted the political system imposed upon them. They ‘simply got by’. See Johnston, Timothy, Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin, 1939–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. xxivCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

105 Shanghai kunchong yanjiusuo 上海昆虫研究所, ‘Zhongguo de songganjie’ 中国的松干蚧 (Matsucoccus in China), Linye keji ziliao 林业科技资料, no. 1, 1976, p. 14; ‘Riben songganjie de xin tiandi—yinban piaochong de chubu yanjiu’ 日本松干蚧的新天敌—隐斑瓢虫的初步研究 (The new natural enemy of Matsucoccus matsumurae—a preliminary study on Ballia obscurosignata Liu), Zhejiang linye keji 浙江林业科技, no. 3, 1977, p. 1.

106 Zhejiang sheng songganjie yanjiu xiezuo zu 浙江省松干蚧研究协作组, ‘Songganjie de yanjiu’ 松干蚧的研究 (Studies on Matsucoccus matsumurae), Zhejiang linye keji 浙江林业科技, no. 2, May 1974, p. 18.

107 The Zhejiang Provincial Archives, J117-019-133, p. 1; J117-019-370, p. 57.

108 The Zhejiang Provincial Archives, J117-019-133, pp. 1–2. Another source indicates that Matsucoccus matsumurae damaged 667 hectares of pine forests in the West Lake mountainous area. See ‘Maweisong de xin haichong—songganjie’ 马尾松的新害虫—松干蚧 (The horsetail pine's new destructive insect—Matsucoccus matsumurae), Keji jianbao 科技简报, no. 15, April 1973, p. 32.

109 Shi, Xihu zhi, p. 815.

110 ‘Maweisong de xin haichong—songganjie’, p. 32.

111 ‘Yijiuqisan nian songganjie fangzhi yanjiu xiezuo huiyi jiyao’ 一九七三年松干蚧防治研究协作会议纪要 (Minute of the 1973 collaborative meeting on the prevention and curing Matsucoccus), Linye keji ziliao 林业科技资料, no. 1, 1974, p.13.

112 ‘Riben songganjie de xin tiandi’; Shanghai kunchong yanjiusuo, ‘Zhongguo de songganjie’.

113 The Zhejiang Provincial Archives, J117-019-133, p. 2.

114 Schmalzer, ‘On the Appropriate Use of Rose-Colored Glasses’, p. 358.

115 Gao, Renmin gongshe shiqi Zhongguo nongmin ‘fan xingwei’ diaocha, p. 3.

116 Jones, Owain and Cloke, Paul, ‘Non-Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time’, in Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, (eds) Knappett, Carl and Malafouris, Lambros (Berlin: Springer, 2008), p. 3Google Scholar.

117 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 11–12.

118 Gao, Renmin gongshe shiqi zhong Zhongguo nongmin ‘fan xingwei’ diaocha, p. 3.

119 Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, (trans.) Porter, Catherine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 81Google Scholar.

120 Harvey, David, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1996), p. 189Google Scholar.

Figure 0

Figure 1. Hangzhou in China.Source: The author.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Mountains and villages in the West Lake area.Source: The author.

Figure 2

Figure 3. Nixon's visit to West Lake, 26 February 1972.Source: Renmin huabao 人民画报 [People's Pictorial], No. 4 [the supplementary issue], 1972, p. 4.